Beat Pfister

Dr. Beat Pfister Speech Processing Group Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory ETH Zurich

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Biography

Beat Pfister received his diploma in electrical engineering (Dipl. El.-Ing. ETH) and his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH). For his diploma thesis, he got the Silver Medal of the ETH Zurich and he won the first prize of the IEEE Region 8 Student Paper Contest 1976 in London.

From 1976 to 1980 he was a researcher at the Applied Physics Laboratory. As a founder member of the speech processing group, he designed and built fast signal processors in ECL (emitter-coupled logic) bit-slice technology for real-time speech processing applications.

After this period of hardware development, his main research interests have been text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition with emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches including signal processing, statistical modelling, knowledge-based systems and linguistics.

Since 1981, he has been the head of the Speech Processing Group which is associated to the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory (TIK) of the ETH Zurich. He acquired and guided numerous research projects in speech coding, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition, and speaker verification. Additionally, his group was involved in some thirty collaborative projects with industries. Furthermore, he has been active in forensic speaker verification casework for more than ten years.

Beat Pfister teaches speech processing at the ETH. In this two-semester course the textbook Sprachverarbeitung is used. The course covers the fundamentals in speech and language processing and introduces specific solutions of problems in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition. Please use this link to get more information of the course.

For further information about the current research activities, please consult the homepage of the Speech Processing Group.

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